Message-ID: <38250asstr$1031537405@assm.asstr-mirror.org>
Return-Path: <LadyCyrrh@aol.com>
From: LadyCyrrh@aol.com
X-Original-Message-ID: <a3.2e22d9bb.2aad21db@aol.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-ASSTR-Original-Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2002 17:57:47 EDT
Subject: {ASSM} {REVIEW} The Annex Reviews. 9/8/02
Date: Sun,  8 Sep 2002 22:10:05 -0400
Path: assm.asstr-mirror.org!not-for-mail
X-Is-Review: yes
Approved: <assm@asstr-mirror.org>
Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories,alt.sex.stories.d
Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d
X-Archived-At: <URL:http://assm.asstr-mirror.org/Year2002/38250>
X-Moderator-Contact: ASSTR ASSM moderation <story-ckought69@hotmail.com>
X-Story-Submission: <ckought69@hotmail.com>
X-Moderator-ID: kelly, newsman, gill-bates

The Annex Reviews, 9/8/02
by Lady Cyrrh (ladycyrrh@aol.com)
Website: http://members.aol.com/ladycyrrh 




The stories:

F*U*C*K Radio (Writerzblocked): F/F mc, humor
Panic Attack (Dryad): M/F, rom
Freedom in the New World (Bradley Stoke): M/F, nc, interr, anal, viol, 
     hist

Website Review: Gromet's Self Bondage, Mummification, and Latex Plaza




Panic Attack [A-]
Where posted: ASSM
When posted: 8/20/02
Author: Dryad
Author address: gbbjg@NOSPAM.yahoo.com
Author website: http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/Dryad/www
Type: M/F rom, oral

A married woman is feeling overwhelmed by the events of everyday life 
(picking up the kids from daycare, worrying about losing her job, etc.) 
and is running around frantically looking for her car keys. Her 
husband suggests she blow off her meeting and slow down a bit. To 
reinforce the suggestion he begins to undress her and forces her to take 
a candlelit bath to the dulcet strains of Enya. Oral sex on his part follows.

This was a quick, romantic tale, though somewhat misrepresented as the 
"panic attack" of the title was really no more than a workaday 
conniption fit. I've seen real panic attacks, and they ain't pretty; to 
bring a loved one out of one by using oral sex would have been a real 
challenge for the writer, and made a more unusual and distinctive story. 
This was, in fact, what I was expecting to see, though the interlude was 
pleasant enough. Nice, but not really distinctive.




F*U*C*K Radio [A-]
Where posted: ASSM
When posted: 7/31/02
Author: Writerzblocked
Author address: writerzblocked@aol.com
Type: F/F, mc, humor

If the above story might have read too blandly, this story goes in the 
opposite direction, using one writer's very distinctive voice, characters, 
and settings. The narrator is a DA who's best friends with an ex-hippy 
lawyer named Bubbles who has a flair for using mind control techniques 
on her clients, or those who cross her -- not maliciously, but 
mischievously. The story concerns what happens when they decide to 
take down a local right-wing radio personality in a spectacular way, 
Bubbles calling in and using her voice to force Mrs. Limbaugh to have 
an on-the-air orgasm. 

Distinctive, no? But that distinctiveness came with a swamp of clever 
details and snappy dialogue, so many offhand smirks and witty repartees, 
in fact, that I found myself getting befuddled. Granted, the characters 
were part of another story series where their backgrounds and powers 
would have been explained. But even considering that, the story wasn't 
very user-friendly; I felt more like I was eavesdropping on the author, 
not invited into the story circle. And though the story concerned sex and 
sexual mind control it really wasn't very sexy -- the plot was more like 
an extended prank pulled by a Ken Kesey counterculture sort. I found 
myself actually feeling sorry for the victim and questioning the 
characters' maturity, something one usually doesn't do when reading 
erotic fiction of a fantastic nature. Also, the payoff -- the victim's 
humiliation -- was too brief and undetailed for all the buildup it got 
beforehand.

In sum, I'd say this was an amusing satire about unusual characters, but 
not really erotic mind control, despite the title.




Freedom in the New World [A]
Where posted: ASSM
When posted: 8/23/02
Author: Bradley Stoke
Author address: bradley_stoke@hushmail.com
Author website: http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/Bradley_Stoke/www
Type: M/F, nc, interr, anal, viol, hist

Lovely Thasra is a slave belonging to the boorish Enoch Evans, who 
alternately lectures his slaves about American democracy and bangs the 
hell out of them. It is early in the 19th century, and slavery is still legal 
in the states. Thasra submits to her master's attentions while reflecting 
on their irony: 

____________________________________________________________

"You should all consider yourselves lucky to live in the land of 
Freedom and Democracy," he would sometimes tell his slaves, 
regarding them in their well-worn ragged clothes; their hands and feet 
rough from labour in the house and in his extensive farm, and all 
struggling to comprehend a language which wasn't their own and of 
which they had differing levels of fluency. Thasra was in the awkward 
position of sharing with the other slaves no other language than that of 
her white devil masters with which to communicate. But she 
understood enough to realise that the freedom and liberty of which 
Enoch was so proud did not extend to those who so recently had been 
free in another continent where white men were rare and it was never 
as cold in the dead of the American winter. 
____________________________________________________________

Eventually she does something about it.

I'm always a sucker for a historical sex tale, though this wasn't so much a 
sex story as a character study, and, as the author explains, a rumination 
on American freedoms. Still, the sex was handled well, and if it wasn't 
exactly arousing (and I hope no one gets aroused by a young black 
woman's humiliation) it was interesting to read and felt true to life -- I 
felt like I was present in the scene and feeling all the protagonist did, 
the benchmark of any good story.

I do think, though, that it could have used more development. It read like 
it had been written quickly in the heat of the moment without much 
research, and polished later. For example, at one point the slave thinks 
about the zebra, antelope, and lions of her village grasslands, which 
implies East Africa; yet most of the New World/Old World slave trade took 
place on Africa's western coast.  Unless the slave coffle had a trek of 
some months, this doesn't seen possible to me. Of course, I'm no history 
expert, but it was one of those things that just stood out.




____________________________________________________________

Website Review: Gromet's Self Bondage, Mummification, and Latex Plaza
Address: http://grometsplaza.web1000.com
Owner: Gromet
Reviewed: 9/4/02

There are bondage stories, and then there are bondage stories, as far 
different from scarves-and-bedposts tie-me-ups as Rottweillers are from 
toy poodles. I don't mean just leather corsets and whipping frames. I'm 
talking about padlocked rubber catsuits, vacuum-pumped  body bags, and 
full-body mummification. Gromet, the creator of this site, has put 
together a prime selection of such stories, all of them free and updated 
weekly. 

I suppose some of you are now scratching your heads wondering why 
anyone would want to mummify, or be mummified by, someone else. It is 
an unusual fetish, even taking into account the mummy aspect is more 
figurative than literal. But there are many ways to make a human 
mummy. Rubber, latex, saran wrap, bandages, duct tape, all suffice, as 
long as the person is immobilized completely by having their limbs 
pressed tightly against their body so that the blood throbs through their 
veins; in such an immobilized, suspended state the mummified one finds 
sexual ecstasy. The stories go about this end in a number of ways. 
Sometimes the plot concerns revenge, or people experimenting with 
their home grown techniques. Sometimes a machine is used, with or 
without a high tech or science fiction setting. A few stories had mythic 
Egyptian tones, or involved fantasy characters or aliens. 

For my review I picked eleven stories from the mummification and latex 
sections, which together held about two hundred stories. The quality 
ranged from very good to eh, not so good. Some writers made the 
fantastic nature of their bondage setups seem real and convincing; 
others did not. In the poorly written "The Slave Trial" by Matt L., for 
example, three gorgeous slaves vie, through being as submissive as 
possible (which meant doing nothing) to win a place as their Master's 
"permanent latex bondage submissive" locked in a rubber sheet on a 
strapped table -- a dubious honor, if you ask me. Silliness also reigned in 
RbrBill's "Alien Rubber" in which the whole human race is transformed, 
by aliens into rubber bondage slaves, not so much Ricky Horror as 
Rocky Horrible. But Fringe's delightful "The Rubberisation of 
ElectraWoman and DynaGirl" took the silliness and turned it into camp, 
with the two eternally perky heroines threatened by "Rubber Queen" 
and her community of bondage aficionados. Unfortunately, after an 
excellent start, it was left unfinished, ending at the point where the 
"rubberisation" would begin. 

Other stories were quite serious, reaching a level of intensity and 
imagination rivaling that in regular bondage fiction. Perhaps the most 
intense of these was Toran's "Do You Want to Continue?" written as a sort 
of love letter from Toran, one of the site's principle writers (and a dom 
male) to another writer, Jenny (a sub female.) The idealized affair takes 
the two from a polyamorous Master/slave relationship with two other 
submissives to a fulfillment of Jenny's most extreme fantasy, that of 
being mummified and buried alive in a faux-Egyptian tomb, which Toran 
is only too happy to grant her. The story strains its plausibility in places 
(such as the contact lens/cameras glued to the victim's eyes so she can 
access live action views of her entombment) but the overall effect is 
dark, majestic, and deliciously cruel, an A+ work of fiction in any genre:


____________________________________________________________

Jenny tells herself that this is what she wants.  Enjoy it.  Savor it.  It's 
at 
this moment, as she focuses on the feed from the tiny camera inside with 
her  the one that shows her mummified body rigidly trapped in her 
sarcophagus, a bound girl for which there is now no escape  at this 
moment the vibrator comes to life with the first of its damnable bursts of 
power.  She feels the first uncontrollable ripple of giddy warmth race 
through her body and the feeling builds and the fear that is racing right 
along with the warmth only adds fuel to the fire.  Forever  she could be 
here forever.  Fucking forever... The massive hoist is attached to the 
entire sarcophagus now and with barely a tug, it lifts the heavy wooden 
tomb a few feet.  The floor underneath the sarcophagus trembles then 
and slides away to reveal a huge and gaping black hole.  Inside the 
sarcophagus, sealed in by elaborate locking mechanisms that now not 
even the hoist could rip the top off, Jenny doesn't feel any movement as 
she's lowered into the black darkness.  He's going to bury her! 
____________________________________________________________


A little while later she's sealed in for good, with cement. But her lover 
still gives her a choice: 


____________________________________________________________

 "Do you want to continue?"  There is already hundreds of pounds of 
cement, a heavy wooden coffin, six layers of linen and sealing compound 
wrapped around her.  She's sealed in.  Totally sealed in.  But he can still 
stop it.  She knows it.  He's surely thought of how to get her out, 
otherwise he wouldn't ask her, now, when she's making the last decision.  
She has to say no.  She has to put a stop to this right fucking now because 
this is real, this is no turning back. 

She moans her answer.  "Yes." 

The vibrator kicks in just as the cement fills the pit completely, and its 
panic and fear and arousal and everything that she's ever dreamed about 
and fantasized about and when she sees Teri, naked, fighting furiously 
against the chains that bind her, being attached to the hoist and when 
she hears Toran's voice in her ears telling her that every mummified 
queen has her pets sealed in with her forever and Teri surely qualified 
as her closest pet, and when she sees Teri, crying around her thick gag, 
being lowered into the still liquid cement until only bubbles, lazily 
popping at the surface shows she's ever existed  the biggest hardest 
longest orgasm erupts from deep inside Jenny and as she's powerless to 
stop anything now, it rolls through her and sends her into satisfied 
blackness. 
____________________________________________________________


Probably the quintessential mummy story, and one of the best pieces of 
gothic erotica I've read. Poe would be pleased.

Most of the stories, however, had less dom-sub interaction. I found self-
bondage machines figured strongly in a lot of them, ranging from 
virtual reality units that fulfill one's every fantasy to coin-operated 
amusement machines that offer unspeakable delights. The genre 
inspires far more of these than other I've read, besides ASFR.  In "The 
Factory" by Tr_Veller, an amateur spy gets sucked into a machine that 
dresses and poses life-sized dolls in rubber fetish gear, with the same 
results for herself. In "Virtual Bondage" by Russ, the machine is a 
virtual reality headset, causing the user to experience what it's like a for 
a fly to be trapped in a spider's web; the writing here was especially 
gripping. XVX'S "Bound to Happen" features a self-mummification device 
that binds its victims in decorative wrappings that simulate those of 
nature: butterfly chrysalis, bat, mermaid, the process coordinated with 
pieces of classical music. As in so many of these stories the device 
malfunctions or works too well, treating its goth-chick victim to a three-
day orgy of mummification, after which both it, and her, are 
repossessed. Silly or stimulating? You decide. In Jenny's "The 
Entertainment Center" the device is more sinister: it literally mummifies 
its victim alive, Egyptian-style, which includes having your brains 
sucked out of your nose by a straw. Definitely not for the squeamish.

The other strong theme of these stories is that of revenge. In RubberH's 
"The Effects of Downsizing" a surly, unemployed husband becomes a 
rubberized pleasure slave when his wife gets fed up with him; in "The 
Widows' Surprise" by Glassmummy a gold-digging widow is mummified 
and placed in public with a sign around her neck denoting her misdeeds 
(not much of a revenge considering her face is covered.) "The Sentence" 
by Filador50 has a more extreme punishment: the male victim is 
mummified alive and plastered into a coffin, the story going into 
fetishistic levels of detail about it; no two stories had exactly the same 
process, which made the long passages interesting, if not exactly 
arousing, to me. This story also utilized mythic elements of wetwi, 
ancient Egyptian specialists in making mummies, though they didn't 
disembowel him and put his guts in a jar, as the real <i>wetwi</i> did. 
(There were just as many male mummy victims in these stories as female 
ones.)
<P>
But the best revenge story for my money was "Emily's Folly" by Tom. Tom 
was a particularly sadistic writer whose stories have no happy endings, 
though the victims do get what they deserve, or what the author thinks 
they deserve. Poor Emily is after Tom's job and pays the price when he 
drugs her and sticks her in a pallet wrapping machine:


____________________________________________________________

Now John, controlling the winch, moved her up and into the machine. 
What was she going to do if it covered her nose? Surely she would 
suffocate. She was lowered down towards the floor and then jerked to a 
stop. John with a look of pure malevolence and pleasure flicked the red 
switch and the machine began to wrap. It started at the top with her feet 
and pulled them snug together as the wrap was wound round and round 
Emilys squirming legs. The wrap was overlapping every time creating 
an incredibly tight shrink wrapped package. Emily could feel her legs 
being constricted together as they were being forced into each other. 
The machine reached her thighs and bottom and squeezing her ass into a 
pert peach and continued its journey enslaving her tied hands and 
stomach. Emily was being mummified in the black shiny wrap and there 
was nothing she could do about it. John was stood there with his erection 
plainly showing through his trousers still glaring at the marvelous 
spectacle before him.  

The machine encircled Emily's chest and breasts with hundreds of 
metres of wrap and carried on towards her neck and face. She could not 
even wriggle through the numerous layers and she truly though she 
would die. The wrap connected with the neck and tightly bound it stiff 
but left her enough room so she could breathe.  

That's not going to help once my nose is covered thought Emily darkly. 
Then her vision and air supply were completely cut off and she was 
thrust into darkness. She could feel her head being securely bound. 
Then there was a pause while the machine made ready to wrap her 
vertically. Then it began again but this time it only took 20 seconds. She 
felt her body being lifted out of the machine and laid out on the floor. 
Almost at the point of blacking out from lack of oxygen and being hung 
upside down for so long she was almost exultant with joy when John 
carefully opened the wrap at her nose so she could breathe. 

"How do you like that," laughed John while he stood over her like a 
hunter who has caught his prey. 
____________________________________________________________


Don't try this at home, folks! I mean it.

This story ends when Tom hoists his mummy into the rafters and leaves 
her there: "With a last lingering look at the shadows far above him he 
turned of the lights and headed home. Emily never did get to ring her 
Mum that weekend, or ever again for that matter."

Strong stuff, this.

The site was for the most part clear of annoying ads, and well organized, 
if garish (lots of bright reds and blues) and easy to navigate. In addition 
to the mummy archive and latex archives there were self-bondage, 
vacuum pump (with warnings), regular bondage, and guest archives, 
each searchable by author and title. There were also sections on bondage 
techniques ("The Beginner's Guide to Clingfilming"), reader 
correspondence, the experiences of Gromet's "other half" regarding her 
SO's startling hobby, and a writers' guide. There were also lots of mummy 
photos, though I couldn't tell if there were real people in there or not. 
It's clear the site's creator is doing all of this as a labor of love for his 
community.

All in all, the site is a good place to get your mummy fix in a friendly 
fashion and perhaps pick up some pointers along the way.  


Interface: B+
Content: A+ to C+
Will I visit again: Yes.


____________________________________________________________
Comments to: ladycyrrh@aol.com
Website--->  http://members.aol.com/ladycyrrh

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| alt.sex.stories.moderated ----- send stories to: <ckought69@hotmail.com> |
| FAQ: <http://assm.asstr-mirror.org/faq.html>  Moderator: <story-ckought69@hotmail.com> |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Discuss this story and others in alt.sex.stories.d, look for subject {ASSD}|
|Archive at <http://assm.asstr-mirror.org>   Hosted by <http://www.asstr-mirror.org>      |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+